By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
While many other famous foreign Web services such as Google, MySpace, Youtube and Facebook all struggle to impress Korean Internet users, Yahoo Korea's chief says that it is ready and confident to win back the local audience this year. And he has good reasons to believe so.
Kim James Woo, chief executive of Yahoo Korea, said that visitors are staying longer when they visit Yahoo Korea's Web site and read more news articles. The site now has only a 4.5 percent market share according to Web research firm Rankey.com. But as for its news service, the market share has gone up to 11 percent over the past year, Kim said.
``Based on our page view growth, we have proven that we have substantially fixed the quality issue at Yahoo Korea last year. When someone visits Yahoo Korea's Web site, now they spend more time on the site than ever before,'' he said in an interview with The Korea Times last week. ``We have proven that people who come to our site really like what they see. Now we are going to generate additional visitors.''
Yahoo was the largest and most popular Web portal in South Korea from the launch of the Korean site in 1997 until around 2000. It lost its market to locally grown sites such as Naver and Daum.
Struggling to find a breakthrough, the company headquarters appointed Kim to oversee its Korean business a year ago. He also manages Overture Korea, Yahoo's subsidiary that brokers advertisements for Web sites.
Kim is a Korean-American who grew up in Guam. He has a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and an MBA from Harvard. He moved to Korea three years ago to head the Overture business. He now splits his days between offices of the two companies, facing each other across Teheran Street in southern Seoul.
Though the company does not report its sales and income status to outsiders, Kim said that there are indices that can measure the changes that took place in the company. Yahoo Korea had the highest attrition rate among all Yahoo branches a year ago because many workers left it for other fancier workplaces such as Google's Korean branch. But now the attrition has dropped to the lowest level in all Yahoo and no one left for Google Korea while he was in charge, he said.
The main reason for the improvement is that he fostered better communication with the U.S. headquarters, as well as with the local employees, he says.
``A few years ago we had very low image and trust from the headquarters. Now I can tell you that we are probably the most trusted country in yahoo standards,'' he said. `` Communication was also big part of it. I think that I understand both local Korean and U.S. culture. So I am able to properly bridge the proper expectations from both parties.''
To get friendlier with employees, Kim arranged various events such as ping-pong tournaments, which he rules with a respectable record of 40-2. He also outscored 84 employees in a recent bowling outing even though he hadn't bowled in the last 30 years, he said.
Fluent in both Korean and English, Kim said his mission was a ``change manager'' to invigorate Yahoo Korea and it is almost accomplished now.
``I consider myself a turnaround guy, and turning around a business is really my passion,'' he said. ``Now that a year has passed, I actually feel much better about my achievements.''